Internal Comms & Meetings

How to draft a slack announcement as Small HR Teams

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Small HR Teams2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You're a two-person HR team and Slack is where your announcements go to die. You draft the open enrollment reminder in a Google Doc, copy-paste it into Slack, forget to @here the right channels, and three days later someone in Austin says they never saw it. Or you're writing the same PTO policy update for the fifth time because the last four are buried in threads nobody searches. You have Paylocity or ADP for payroll data, Notion for policies nobody reads, and a Slack workspace with 40 channels and no system. Every announcement is a fresh blank page, written from memory, at the wrong moment.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Small HR Teams2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A Starch app that drafts Slack announcements from a prompt — pulling in live headcount, policy context from Notion, and payroll calendar milestones so the message is accurate before you send it

An automated reminder workflow that watches your HR calendar and surfaces upcoming announcement triggers (open enrollment, review cycle kickoff, PTO deadlines) so nothing slips

A searchable log of every announcement ever sent, linked to the context that produced it, so you can reuse, audit, or update without starting from scratch

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Email Agent Knowledge Management

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Paylocity data on a schedule (employee counts, payroll run dates, benefit enrollment windows) and connects directly to Notion for policy docs. Google Calendar is connected as a scheduled-sync provider for milestone tracking. For the Notion knowledge base, Starch connects directly and syncs pages and databases on a schedule. Slack is connected from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live when your automation runs to post or preview announcements.

Prompts to copy

Build me a Slack announcement drafter that pulls our current open enrollment window from Paylocity, checks our benefits policy doc in Notion, and writes a channel-ready message for #general and #benefits with the correct deadline, a one-sentence summary of what's changing, and a link to the enrollment portal

Create a knowledge base that stores every HR announcement we've sent, auto-tags it by category (benefits, payroll, policy, culture), and lets me search by topic so I can reuse or update past messages instead of rewriting from scratch

Set up a weekly automation that checks our Google Calendar for upcoming HR milestones in the next 14 days and drafts a Slack announcement for each one, ready for my review before it goes out

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Paylocity to Starch as a scheduled-sync provider — Starch will pull your employee roster, payroll run dates, and benefit enrollment windows automatically so your announcements always reflect current headcount and deadlines.

2 Connect Notion from Starch's integration catalog. Point it at the workspace where your HR policies, onboarding docs, and benefits guides live — Starch syncs pages and databases on a schedule so the announcement drafter can pull accurate policy language without you copying and pasting.

3 Connect Google Calendar as a scheduled-sync provider. Starch reads your HR team calendar 3 months ahead, which is how the milestone-detection automation knows when open enrollment, review cycle kickoff, or a payroll deadline is approaching.

4 Connect Slack from Starch's integration catalog. The agent queries it live — you'll be able to preview announcement drafts, pick the right channel, and (once you approve) post directly without leaving Starch.

5 Install the Knowledge Management starter app and describe your announcement archive to Starch: 'Build me a searchable log of every HR announcement, tagged by category — benefits, payroll, policy, culture — with the date sent, the channels it went to, and the original draft text.'

6 Start populating the archive. Paste in the last six months of announcements you can find in Slack. The Knowledge Management app auto-categorizes them. Now you have a reusable library instead of a graveyard of threads.

7 Build the announcement drafter. Tell Starch: 'When I describe an HR announcement topic, pull the relevant policy from Notion, check the current Paylocity enrollment window or payroll calendar, and draft a Slack message I can review and send — formatted for #general or a specific channel, with a subject line, a one-paragraph body, and a clear call to action.'

8 Test it with a real upcoming event. Type in something like: 'Draft a Slack announcement reminding employees that open enrollment closes October 31st. We're on Paylocity. Use the benefits summary doc in Notion and keep it under 150 words.' Review the draft, edit if needed, and send.

9 Set up the calendar-driven automation. Tell Starch: 'Every Monday morning, check Google Calendar for any HR milestones in the next 14 days. For each one, draft a Slack announcement and send it to my Slack DM for review.' This replaces the mental overhead of remembering what's coming.

10 Wire the archive step into your send workflow. After you approve and send each announcement, tell Starch to log it in the Knowledge Management app with the category, date, channel, and full text. In three months you'll have a library worth having.

11 Set up a simple FAQ surface in the Knowledge Management app: 'Build a view that shows the 10 most recently sent announcements sorted by category, so when an employee asks about open enrollment I can find what we sent in under 30 seconds.'

12 Once the pattern is stable, expand it: 'Build me an automation that watches for new hires added to Paylocity this week and drafts a welcome announcement for #general with their name, role, start date, and team — ready for me to review each Friday afternoon.'

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

Q4 2025 Open Enrollment Announcement — October 2025

Sample numbers from a real run

Employees on current benefits plan (Paylocity sync)	143
New hires eligible for first enrollment	7
Enrollment window (days)	14
Slack channels targeted (#general, #benefits, #remote-team)	3
Minutes to draft, review, and send	8

It's the first week of October. Open enrollment opens October 15th and closes October 29th — 14 days, 150 employees, two HR people. Last year you sent three separate messages because the first one had the wrong deadline and the second one didn't mention the dental plan change. This year you open Starch and type: 'Draft the open enrollment announcement. Enrollment opens October 15th and closes October 29th. Pull the current headcount from Paylocity, reference the 2026 benefits summary in Notion, mention the new dental plan option we added, and format it for #general. Keep it under 200 words.' Starch pulls 143 enrolled employees plus 7 new hires from the Paylocity sync, finds the benefits summary doc in Notion, and returns a draft in about 20 seconds. You catch one line that needs tweaking — the dental plan name was slightly wrong in the Notion doc, which you also fix — and send it to #general and #benefits. The Knowledge Management app logs it automatically. Two weeks later when someone asks 'when does enrollment close?' you can find the exact message in eight seconds instead of scrolling through Slack history.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Time from 'I need to send an announcement' to message sent (target: under 15 minutes including review)

Percentage of HR milestones that get an announcement drafted before the deadline — not after

Employee reply rate or reaction rate on announcements (a proxy for clarity and reach)

Number of 'I never saw that' complaints per quarter from employees

Time spent answering repeat questions about topics that were already announced

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Writing it yourself in Slack

Free and instant, but every announcement starts from a blank page with no policy context, no headcount data, and no memory of what you sent last time.

Notion announcements page

Good for documentation but nobody checks Notion proactively — you still have to write the Slack message separately and the two drift apart immediately.

Rippling or BambooHR built-in announcements

Covers basic company-wide broadcasts but doesn't draft for you, doesn't pull in payroll calendar context, and doesn't give you a searchable archive outside of the HRIS.

Slack's native scheduled messages

Handles the timing problem but not the drafting problem — you still write every message from scratch and there's no connection to your policy docs or HR data.

ChatGPT or Claude directly

Can draft well, but you have to manually look up headcount, copy in policy text, and keep no persistent archive — each session starts from zero.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — email agent, knowledge management all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Can Starch actually post to Slack, or just draft the message?

Both. Starch connects to Slack from its integration catalog and the agent queries it live when your automation runs. You can have Starch draft the message for your review first (the default) or configure an automation to post directly to a channel once you've approved the template. For anything going to #general, you'll want a review step — that's easy to build in.

We're on Paylocity for payroll. Does Starch actually sync our employee data, or does it just query on demand?

Starch syncs your Paylocity data on a schedule — employees, payroll runs, benefits, time off. That data lives in Starch's database and is available to your apps and automations without hitting Paylocity live every time. So when the announcement drafter needs current headcount, it's pulling from the most recent sync, not making a slow API call in the middle of your draft.

What if we use ADP instead of Paylocity?

Same story. Starch syncs your ADP data on a schedule — workers, org units, pay statements. The announcement drafter and the onboarding automations work the same way regardless of which payroll provider you're on.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We process payroll data and HR info.

Not yet — Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. That's worth knowing if your organization has compliance requirements that demand it. It's on the roadmap. If SOC 2 is a hard requirement today, that's an honest reason to wait or to scope carefully what data you connect.

Our Notion is a mess — half-updated policies, old docs nobody archived. Will the Knowledge Management app just inherit that chaos?

Starch connects directly to Notion and syncs your pages and databases on a schedule, but it surfaces what's there — it won't automatically clean up outdated content. What it will do is let you ask 'which of these docs haven't been updated in over 6 months?' so you can identify what to fix. The announcement drafter pulling from stale Notion docs is a real risk, so the practical move is to do a light audit of the 10-15 policy docs you'd actually reference in announcements before you wire them in.

Can I set this up so the automation sends announcements without me reviewing every one?

Yes, you can build a fully automated flow that posts to Slack on a schedule. For milestone-triggered announcements like 'open enrollment closes in 3 days,' a no-review automation is reasonable once you've tested the template a few times. For anything dynamic — new hire intros, policy changes — a review step is one extra line in your prompt and worth keeping.

We have 40 Slack channels. Can Starch figure out which channel an announcement should go to?

You can either tell Starch explicitly in your prompt ('post this to #benefits and #remote-team') or build a routing rule into the automation ('if the announcement is about payroll or benefits, post to #benefits; if it's company-wide, post to #general'). Starch doesn't guess — it does what you describe, which means your channel targeting is as good as your prompt.